New plan to teach English-language learners approved for School District

By Ian Whitaker

Thursday, April 14, 2016 | 9:29 p.m.

The Clark County School District has committed to an ambitious new plan it promises will improve the quality of teaching for the roughly 70,000 students who struggle to learn English.

School board members voted unanimously Thursday night to implement the district’s first master plan aimed solely at English-language learners, who comprise a quarter of the students in Nevada.

“This has been a long time coming,” Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky told board members.

Instead of a one-sized-fits-all approach, teachers will be trained to tailor their instruction for specific groups of students, such as those who have been classified as an English-language learner for less than two years as well as those who have been ELL students for more than five years. Studies have shown that not every student learns the same.

The plan aims to increase the number of ELL students in Career and Technical education and Advanced Placement courses. It also calls for training CCSD’s roughly 18,000 teachers in the district’s new teaching model in the next five years.

These new policies, the district claims, will cut down on chronic truancy as well as improve the graduation rate for ELL students, currently among the lowest in the district.

“Obviously these are gutsy goals,” said Ignacio Ruiz, ELL program director at CCSD. “But all we want for our ELL students is what we want for the rest of our students.”

The plan has been in the works since last August, a couple months after the district hired Ruiz. The planning included 26 focus groups involving more than 200 teachers, 560 classroom visits and the shadowing of 52 ELL students.

“We really asked ourselves some tough questions,” said Ruiz.

The process found the district lacks opportunities for school staff to improve their skills with ELL students and that the students themselves are not receiving “grade-appropriate, academically rigorous.” It also found that the district’s current ELL teaching practices are not following Nevada’s current academic standards.

“We have huge pockets of inadequacies that we haven’t addressed,” said school board member Carolyn Edwards. “This is going to address it.”

The plan received widespread praise from the school board as well as those in the community.

“It takes a village and the village delivered,” said Sylvia Lazos, UNLV constitutional law professor. “We have an A-plus plan.”